A year ago, three journalists working for Qatar’s Al-Jazeera English network suddenly found themselves caught up in Egypt's harsh security crackdown following the military's overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader. Two of them, Australian Peter Greste, an award-winning former BBC correspondent, and Mohammed Fahym, an Egyptian-born Canadian, were arrested when the police burst into their office suite in Cairo’s Marriott Hotel. The third, Egyptian freelance producer Baher Mohammed, was led away in handcuffs from his Cairo home after his police shot his dog.
Egypt’s crackdown on political dissent has presented President Obama with a difficult choice. On one hand, he’s keenly aware of Egypt’s strategic importance to the U.S. — from cooperation with anti-terrorist intelligence to maintaining the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which is why Obama has refused to characterize Morsi’s overthrow as a coup, a step that would legally require the administration to halt all military aid to Egypt until the country restores democracy. But Obama also wants to be seen as a staunch defender of human rights and democracy, key demands of the Arab Spring protests that challenged autocratic rule in much of the Middle East. To that end, the conflicted president last year held up hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid to Egypt to signal his concern over human rights violations.
Now, however, Washington's strategic considerations appear to have trumped its human rights concerns. The reason: the new Republican-controlled House and Senate are concerned with the rise of ISIS militants. There's also been a huge influx of aid to Egypt from oil-rich Gulf states that has weakened U.S. leverage. Last month, Obama signed legislation that allows him to invoke national security concerns to waive human rights conditions attached to $1.5 billion in mostly military aid to Egypt, such as requirements to hold free and fair elections and protect minority fights. And while Obama periodically speaks out against Egypt's dismal human rights record, there's little doubt among both administration officials and Middle East hands that he will use that waiver to keep the aid to Cairo flowing. “We can harangue the Egyptians all we want about democracy,” says an expert on Egypt at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it doesn't get us anywhere.”
Such attempts at gaining leverage over the Egyptians don't seem to be working. If anything, they have further stoked Egyptian doubts about Washington and driven Cairo closer to those wealthy Gulf nations who have provided el-Sissi with some $32 billion in aid with no conditions attached. By contrast, Washington's annual $1.5 billion aid package now seems paltry. Even with the likelihood that U.S. military aid to Egypt will now flow, the relationship still faces some rough spots. Egyptian officials are resisting American advice to spend its aid money on counterterrorism equipment and border security.
Yet these disagreements are unlikely to change Washington's decision to mute its human rights concerns, which means the jailed Al-Jazeera journalists will have to count on a successful rapprochement between Egypt and Qatar for their release, rather than any further pressure from Washington. As an American working with the Egyptian military said, “I don’t think the administration has much stomach to really push hard against Cairo.”
1.This passage is most probably taken from an article entitled “（ ）”
2.The word “harangue” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to “（ ）”
3.We can infer from the last sentence in the last paragraph that （ ）.
4.According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?
5.What is the author’s attitude towards the dissent’s situation in Egypt?
